Demonstration Ages

If you feel like you're up to the challenge of building your own Ages in Blender or 3ds Max, this is the place for you!

Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Paradox » Sat Sep 05, 2020 5:02 pm

JulyForToday wrote:The effect itself is fairly lacking. This is not a surprise, but it's goes a long way to explaining why Cyan didn't make heavy use of it.


I never said it was a good effect :lol: but people kept asking about it, and I wanted to try it out, so it got added to korman.

A few other limitations:
  • Lighting is calculated based on the object centre-point, not per-vertex. This makes it very hard to use for large meshes.
  • It's all DOT3 faked bumpmapping, so it's still a flat surface. If viewed from an angle, it will be pretty noticeable.
  • I have not seen it play well with envmaps.

I'm actually really impressed with how good that statue looks in Plasma.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Sat Sep 05, 2020 5:14 pm

This is a great resource-thanks for taking the time to make it! I'm amused that it looks like something you'd buy from the epic games store for Unreal. When I tried to export it for MOUL, blender crashed, but maybe that's something with my blender install.

JulyForToday wrote:a material with a normal map can only be applied to one object. You need to use a unique copy of the material for each object you want to apply it to (you can't share the material between 2 different objects, only 1 will actually work)

This is probably a Korman bug - we try to protect the artist from these kinds of nit-picky details. I guess here's another case where we need to engage the "crap, make a copy of the material" mode :ugeek:
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby JulyForToday » Sun Sep 06, 2020 1:45 pm

Paradox wrote:It's all DOT3 faked bumpmapping, so it's still a flat surface. If viewed from an angle, it will be pretty noticeable.


Yes. Without parallax mapping, it's an expected limitation of normal mapping. Poor choice of wording on my part with 'flat'.
I was more trying to convey the fact that even when viewed perpendicular to the surface, Plasma's implementation just doesn't create a good illusion of extra detail to the surface, or even look all that visually appealing.
Probably because it's not per pixel. I guess maybe 'dull' would be a better word. It looks more like someone's impression of a shadow drawn on the surface with a pencil rather then actual bumps and cracks in the object responding to light (convincingly).

Paradox wrote:I have not seen it play well with envmaps.


So far I have not encountered that personally. I haven't tried with a dynamic envmap, but putting a pre-render envmap layer on top of the normal map layer has worked for me. Could you elaborate on what problems you've seen it cause?

Tsar Hoikas wrote:This is a great resource-thanks for taking the time to make it! I'm amused that it looks like something you'd buy from the epic games store for Unreal. When I tried to export it for MOUL, blender crashed, but maybe that's something with my blender install.


You are welcome!

I'm trying to get setup on the Destiny shard so I can test ages with MOUL. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I will see if I can replicate it once I get up and running.

*****

It's likely unrelated to whatever is causing trouble for you, but its worth mentioning that I have been experiencing quite a few crashes during export after I started working with bump mapping (for the material age).
Crashing was pretty rare before. Now it seems pretty common (seems more frequent when I make changes)
The majority of them would happen immediately after the bake lighting stage. I would frequently see:
Exporting 'KormanMaterials.age'

Baking Static Lighting...
Preparing to bake...
...
128 Vertex Color(s) [H:72688A5C9C0588F5]


And Blender would crash immediately after that. Then sometimes it would get past that and be processing objects and then randomly crash there instead.
And as I was writing this blender nearly locked up my machine as it was generating the mip maps for the normal map for maybe 30 seconds until it spit out an access violation message and crashed.
Maybe cached or temporary generate files are causing trouble? Not sure. Just something to be aware of if anyone else is trying out bump mapping.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Tsar Hoikas » Sun Sep 06, 2020 2:29 pm

That's the same point where I was crashing. I'll try to look into it "soon-ish" -- I'm already having to investigate a handful of client crashes right now.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby JulyForToday » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:32 am

Working on improving the material age, and I have an assortment of lingering questions:

- is there a way to make a mesh transparent using only vertex colors? (or has it only ever been by using a texture/stencil? (the faded out bottom of Relto's mountain top does seem to have an vertex color channel named Alpha, with all black at the bottom, but it also has a stencil texture :?: )
- does Plasma/Korman support constant animation curves for uv offset? Or in general? (i.e. a sudden jump in movement from one place to another). I tried my best to get the animated sprite demo setup correctly, but nothing I do prevents it from speeding from one uv position to the next.
- are the any settings for alpha clipping/masking/testing? I seem to recall this used to be an issue way back when. I remember being frustrated that I wanted alpha blending, but would it would do alpha-testing and give a harsh edge when I wanted a soft semi-transparent edge. But maybe I'm mis-remembering or confused about something. Either way, seems that alpha-blending is the only option available (I can't exactly think of a reason I'd actually want to use alpha-testing, but if ever there was a place to include this ability, this age would be it).
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Sirius » Mon Sep 07, 2020 2:07 am

JulyForToday wrote:- is there a way to make a mesh transparent using only vertex colors? (or has it only ever been by using a texture/stencil? (the faded out bottom of Relto's mountain top does seem to have an vertex color channel named Alpha, with all black at the bottom, but it also has a stencil texture :?: )

Yeah, usually you just add a second vertex color channel named "alpha", and paint it white (opaque) or black (transparent). Haven't tested it, but Korman appears to support it.
The Relto mountain has stenciling, but it's only used to blend textures together, and has no impact on the final transparency (which is controlled by the vertex color as you noticed).

JulyForToday wrote:- are the any settings for alpha clipping/masking/testing? I seem to recall this used to be an issue way back when. I remember being frustrated that I wanted alpha blending, but would it would do alpha-testing and give a harsh edge when I wanted a soft semi-transparent edge. But maybe I'm mis-remembering or confused about something. Either way, seems that alpha-blending is the only option available (I can't exactly think of a reason I'd actually want to use alpha-testing, but if ever there was a place to include this ability, this age would be it).

I'm not sure how the option is controlled, but alpha testing is extremely useful since it doesn't end in sorting errors during overdraw (=semitransparent objects not visible through other transparent objects). Grass is a good candidate due to how much overdraw it usually results in.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby JulyForToday » Mon Sep 07, 2020 3:01 pm

I posted the 'finished' clickable age at the start of this thread.

I'm working on the 2nd iteration of the material age, once I get a few more things sorted with it I will post it before moving on to the other ages

And I reserved the block of sequence prefixes from 730-740 for them on the wiki.

Also: I made a modification for Korman that exports font objects as meshes (already submitted a pull request). So if export the age from blender yourself, you won't see the text in Uru unless you duplicate the font objects and convert them to meshes in Blender.

Sirius wrote:Yeah, usually you just add a second vertex color channel named "alpha", and paint it white (opaque) or black (transparent). Haven't tested it, but Korman appears to support it.


By itself, just doing that doesn't seem to work. Maybe there is an additional setting somewhere? *shrugs*
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Doobes » Wed Sep 16, 2020 8:47 am

Sirius wrote:Yeah, usually you just add a second vertex color channel named "alpha", and paint it white (opaque) or black (transparent). Haven't tested it, but Korman appears to support it.


Yeah, sadly, I don't think it does yet. I'm hoping they can add it soon, as pretty much every Cyan Age I've imported and many fan Ages use that method of AlphaBlend, including some of my own.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Tweek » Thu Sep 17, 2020 8:34 am

I use Alpha vertex painting heavily in my Ages.
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Re: Demonstration Ages

Postby Paradox » Sat Sep 19, 2020 1:29 pm

There's currently a bug in korman where objects with alpha vertex paint don't get marked as needing alpha blending. I've got a fix in progress for that bug.

Alpha vertex paint is supposed to work the same way it did in PyPRP.
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